CRM (customer relationship management) is not just about client contact management.  It is software that helps you to collect, organise and maintain customer, product, service and project information in a manner that allows for long term management. Your CRM system should be the central repository for all customer and sales data. It should allow you to quickly assess the status of a client or group of similar clients based on their behavioral patterns, through intelligent and flexible reports. The ability to analyse these patterns is essential because your product/ service/ sales strategies should be based on the information that you have collected about what works and what doesn’t.

For example, how valuable would it be to filter through your contacts and separate out hot and cold leads, high value/profitable clients from high touch/ low revenue clients? If you understand buying trends that occur in specific demographics – you then have the ability to predict a client’s value and build highly targeted sales campaigns.    

Customer retention can also be greatly improved by analysis of data in your CRM system. A customer who has had ongoing problems with a product or service needs to be handled delicately, if historical information about the client is available to everyone in your organization who has contact with them, your team can identify the situation and react accordingly. Once again, by grouping similar customers you can predict a customers current and future needs and build a customer retention/ growth plan around it. 

Client analysis is also great when you are looking at launching a new product or service. Firstly, you can analyse buying patterns and group similar customers together to identify who is likely to take the new product or service up. Secondly, by analyzing historical support cases from previous launches, you may be able to predict the amount of support needed while rolling the new product or service out.